NOLAcycle Bike Map Project

NOLAcycle is a project that wants to produce a high-quality bike map for the City of New Orleans. They also run a pretty well-written blog that chronicles their progress and occasionally comments on other cycling news.

Most of the leg work is being done by Lauren Rae Sullivan, along with Tom Macom and Dan Jatres. We asked Lauren about NOLAcycle, and she responded, “I decided to do this as my senior capstone project for my urban planning degree. Being in New Orleans really changed my perspective on the urban planning process—it’s not sitting around researching and coming up with ideas on your own.”

“What’s different about the NolaCycle Map, other than being a product of the work of hundreds of people, is that it will give cyclists all the information they need to decide their own routes that fit their riding style. Roads will be color-coded to show pavement quality (a huge issue in New Orleans), lane width, and car travel speed, along with railroad/streetcar tracks, and busy intersections.”

This is a worthy project, with usable results, yeah human efficiency! I have been diving into mapping software (GIS) at work. I’ll keep this idea in the back of my head for some time, this could be something I could organize if I ever choose to stop working for a while. My city(Boulder CO) has a bike route planner, but I have yet to see it work. Google maps now has a walking and a public transportation tab, and it works quite well. How cool would it be to send google a text with two addresses and get a text back with biking directions?

There are a lot of slow bikes in new orleans – my mom’s vintage nishiki isn’t one of them

I know there is a big push for a google earth “bike there” feature, but I don’t know what the status is. I’ve been using the walking directions to get a rough idea for biking directions. it’s worked well except you have to keep in mind the one-way streets. i don’t think it’d be hard for google to do a bike layer for google earth in cities with bike lanes and shared-use paths. If they can have streetviews for every major city in America, they can do anything.

Also, Evan, I work and I’m still doing this project. 9-5, M-F. You just have to organize your project so it involves a lot of hang out and doing all your meetings at bars. Then it doesn’t seem like you’re losing your free time to a project!

Awesome project, NOLACycle — maps like these are a tremendous boon to the bicycling community. Bravo for doing this!!!

Despite Tampa’s status as one of (if not THE) most dangerous places to ride a bicycle (statistically speaking), our local Bike/Ped committee produces something called a “bike suitability map” which is very similar to your project. They even have the decency to update it every few years. Check it out here:

Aqua/Lauren Rae: there is already an organisation doing this world wide. It is OpenStreetMap There is a cycle layer available, click the blue plus on the top right corner of the home page. It will only be rendered at high zoom, if there is enough data cycle related data. You could make your own rendering if you want to, so that it would show everything that you think is important.

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